BlizzCon 2009: WoW Game Systems panel live blog

The Game Systems panel live blog will be starting at 11:30 a.m . PDT / 2:30 p.m. EDT. Join us for a great live blog, complete with Ghostcrawler!

Adam will be live blogging, Alex will be taking pictures. Pictures may be inserted into the post after the live blog though, we don't want you to miss anything Ghostcrawler says.

11:23 - There are a ton of people here... they're overflowing the hall this is in. Why not do this on the main stage? There's about 100 people sitting on the dirty floor right in front of the press area.

11:25 - The panel will start in 5 minutes. The people here are well behaved, but there's SOOO many of them. The area is way over capacity.

11:27 - Here's a tidbit for you all as you wait for the panel to being. We found out Ghostcrawler's middle name starts with a T. We're pretty darn sure it's Tiberius. Even if it's not Tiberius, we're just going to say it is, because that'd kick some major ass.

11:30 - Panelists: Greg Street, Cory Stocken, Tom Chilton. PRO PANEL.

Game systems will cover: Rated BGs, Guild Advancement, Mastery, and Paths of the Titans

11:31 - Rated BGs: BGs and Arena gameplay are different. Both are different forms of PvP and both appeal to different types of players.

Cash flow: increases: the gold drop rate by 7% for all kills from creatures or players that reward experience or honor.

Another example: Summon your entire raid instantly!!!

These guild talents will be retalentable. You can respec your guild.

The crowd is loving this.

11:48 - Guild experience is converted into guild currency.

Things like a guild standard that will have flags from your guild on them.

11:49 - Guild heirlooms will be bought with guild currency. Variety of these types of items: mounts, tabards, etc... If the person who buys the plans leaves the guild, they don't get to take the recipie with them. We don't want people to bounce around from guilds very much.

11:50 - Players can buy these heirlooms plans from vendors in major cities.

11:51 - Heirlooms will be bound to the guild. If you leave the guild, the bound item will be automatically be returned to the guild bank. No more people leaving the guild and taking amazing items.

This isn't going to be sons of hodir 2.0, getting glyphs won't be a big bad rep grind.

12:15 - We can add more paths in future patches. Q&A is coming up now.

Q: "Is there going to be a guild alliance system?"

A: "No, we're currently not planning on supporting a guild alliance system."

Q: "Are you going to revamp the cataclysm arena system?"

A: "We're pretty happy with the arena system where it is right now. There's a huge number of people using it. We're seeing less than we did in BC because in BC a lot of people viewed it as a free way to get the best gear they could possibly get."

Q: "Are you going to support a guild merger?"

A: "You have to choose which guild you go into, but you'd have to leave the first guild and go into the second guild." GC: "We're going to support all types of play styles, not just from guild raiding."

Q: "Are there going to be guild talents raiders want to have?"

A: "We're not going to be character talents in the guild talents. We don't want to put talents players have to have in the guild talents, ie: they have to have this talent in order to kill this boss."

A: "We're going to limit the amount of points you can get. it's harder organzationally to get the larger groups, so that's going to limit it too."

Q: "Guild halls?"

A: "Guild halls is something we've talked about. We have to decide what we're going to spend our time on and mean most to the players. It's cool, but as far as benefits to the players there's not a lot there that'll benefit you. We want you in the cities doing things, not in an instance seprated from the rest of the world. it's not high on the priority list."

Q: "As a large guild alliance, we have a lot of different PvP groups and raid groups? Can we get the benefit of the system with something like this?"

A: "We're not going to allow you to merge guilds together and share abilities, no."

Q: "Is there any plans to show all the characters tied to a particular person? We have a lot of altaholics, it's hard to keep track of what character belongs to what person. The notes sometimes arn't enough."

A: "That's something we've talked about over the course of [developing] the system. It's a great suggestion, we've got room in the UI to do that, just a question of where it fits in our priority list."

Q: "Is there going to be more integration in the mobile armory with all this stuff?"

A: "There will be more coming forward over time, but we can't talk about it right now."